The present invention generally relates to manufacturing, remanufacturing or repairing replaceable imaging components, and more particularly to apparatus and techniques for sealing a compartment of a replaceable imaging cartridge holding marking material.
In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging cartridges such as toner cartridges, drum cartridges, inkjet cartridges, and the like. These imaging cartridges are used in imaging devices such as laser printers, xerographic copiers, inkjet printers, facsimile machines and the like, for example. Imaging cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process these cartridges would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed specifically to address this issue. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the imaging cartridge.
Imaging cartridges include one or more compartments holding the marking material which is deposited on a surface, such as paper. For a laser toner cartridge, this compartment is referred to as the toner hopper. During the remanufacture of a laser toner cartridge, any remaining residual toner should be removed from the toner hopper and the toner hopper should be cleaned. New toner is then placed in the toner hopper. Typically, this process is performed through a toner hopper access port provided on the toner cartridge by the original manufacturer of the toner cartridge (OEM) who also used this port to initially load the toner hopper with toner. In the case of certain toner cartridges, such as the toner cartridges for use with the HP 3500 and HP 3700 printers, the OEM filled the toner hopper in another fashion and thus the toner hopper does not include a toner hopper access port. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide systems and methods for creating a toner hopper access port and providing a removable toner hopper cap for sealing the toner hopper access port.